


an equinox dancing along the ecliptic

by beastofthesky



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Comfort, F/F, Femslash February, Happy, Healing, Not Chapter 700 Compliant, Post-Fourth Shinobi War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 04:56:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13780176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beastofthesky/pseuds/beastofthesky
Summary: New growth finds a way out of the ashes of war. Or something like that, Sakura thinks. It's hard to consider that it's all over when there's still so much to wrap up.





	an equinox dancing along the ecliptic

**Author's Note:**

> happy femslash february!! here’s the ending our gals deserved. this au of sorts was written with [syzygy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12369024) in mind, but you don’t have to read that to understand what’s going on here (sakura/ino is a background pairing in that fic).
> 
> heads-up for non-detailed mentions of wounds, medical care, and the like, as part of sakura being a medic.

War, Sakura learns very quickly, does not end when the fighting is over.

She can’t even stop to see if— if that _thing_ had any effect on people physically when it wrapped them all up in its terrible branches. There are too many injured, too many dying for her to worry about that right now.

She works entirely on instinct, muscle memory driving her as she works through the mass of shinobi in need of healing, or in need of… final comforts.

Times like this, like long shifts at the hospital, her brain powers off and her training takes over and her chakra flows where it needs to, channeled in a way that’s been trained so thoroughly as to be instinctive, automatic.

Times like this, she’s a passenger.

She doesn’t even react when she feels a familiar arm wrap around her shoulders, hands still holding bandages, and it takes Ino knocking on her forehead with a knuckle to jolt Sakura back into her body.

“Enough,” Ino says gently, and her smile is tempered by the sheer exhaustion lining her face. “I’ve been sent to force you to get some rest.”

Sakura tries to say _oh_ but only manages a weak grunt because at precisely this moment it hits her like a train, the fact that she’s been working for _hours_ without rest, without rest since this entire battle had _started_ , and she’s so hungry her vision swims—

But Ino’s arm is firm around her shoulders, and she adds a gentle hand to Sakura’s chest to steady her, and— and yes, okay.

“Okay,” Sakura croaks, and strips off her gloves with shaking hands.

 

 

Ino is mostly silent as she escorts Sakura to a tent, sits her down, and methodically shoves three sets of rations into Sakura’s hands. Sakura is grateful for the silence, though, however unusual it may be; she feels like she has to reach though miles of dense fog to grasp at any thought, and the soft sounds of Ino walking around the tent, gathering up a change of clothes and some toiletries, are an immeasurable comfort.

The thought of Konoha drifts through her mind, absent and dim. This could almost be a night off in their apartment, Ino cooking, Sakura sprawled on the couch trying to get some energy back after a hospital shift, both looking forward to watching a cheesy movie to top off a long day.

The thought that follows is a familiar one: how absolutely _absurd_ it had been to ruin their friendship over a _crush_. Over _Sasuke_ , no less. Sakura cares for him — even now, even after everything she cannot say that she doesn’t care for him, that she doesn’t want him to be happy — but being friends with Ino now, everything they’ve shared since their odd reconciliation during the disastrous chūnin exams… they could have had this for even longer.

(But they’d been children, and nothing had been more deathly serious than fighting for love, and so Sakura can forgive both their younger selves. A little.)

There’s a lot left to do here, still, and Sakura doesn’t know when she’ll be able to go home, but she’s looking forward to it more than anything.

And—

“Ino?” Sakura reaches out and wraps her fingers around Ino’s wrist, stilling her friend as she walks by with a clean shirt in her hands. “I’m sorry.”

Ino doesn’t so much sit on the cot next to Sakura as she collapses onto it, lip trembling.

“Don’t,” she says, hoarsely. Her voice wavers. “It’s okay, it’s just—” Ino’s hands curl in around her own waist and she hunches her shoulders and to hell with it all, Sakura wraps her sweaty and burnt and dirty self around her best fucking friend and _holds_ as Ino shakes with the effort of biting back her sobs. “It’s okay,” Ino repeats, voice breaking, “It’s okay, it’s okay— really, it’s okay—” She takes a deep, shuddering breath and pushes away from Sakura, only just slightly.

Her eyes are blurred and red but her face is starting to settle back into her usual look of clever determination and her hand is fisted into the front of Sakura’s shirt and Sakura has all of half a second to think _oh, hell_ and then—–

It’s— it’s messy, and awkward, and Sakura is about 50% sure that both of them are still crying a bit, but Ino’s intent comes through the kiss like a gut punch, like an overjoyed shout, like hands brushing hair out of her eyes.

“Okay,” Ino says, firmly, “one, I want to be perfectly clear that this isn’t some— some grief thing—” Sakura watches tears well up again in Ino’s eyes at the words, and then Ino inhales through her nose and steadies herself. “—and two, I should have done this _way_ sooner.” And at this she darts forward again and Sakura’s mind is in so many places at once that she lets out a noise of surprise as Ino kisses her again, short and sharp.

“No contest,” Sakura manages, a little weakly.

Gravity is pulling her down, down, pulling at her arms, willing her to lie down, and while that’s all Sakura wants to do right now — god, Ino is warm and she’s soft and how many times have they curled up on the couch together and Sakura never—?

A stray tear rolls its way down Ino’s cheek. Sakura thumbs it away slowly and takes stock of the deep bruises under Ino’s eyes, the lankness of her hair.

“Ino,” Sakura says, again, gently, and she could say this over and over for years, _Ino Ino Ino_ , “please, please get some rest. You look exhausted.”

Ino smiles ruefully.

“If I lie down, I’m not gonna get up for days,” she says, and her smile falls away slowly. “I’m head of the Sensor Division now,” she continues, words marching out forced and machine-like. “They still need me to relay messages. I should be heading back to the commanders.”

Sakura closes her eyes but doesn’t fight, as much as she wants to, because there’s something to be said about stones and glass houses and the fact that she’s about to head out to see how her two blockheads are doing. She opens her eyes again at the feel of Ino’s calloused hands carefully cupping her face.

“Can we talk about this? Later? I kinda have a lot to say.”

“Yeah,” Sakura replies. “Of course.”

She lays her hand over Ino’s, and Ino leans their foreheads together, and they breathe. Sakura knows just as well as Ino that “later” could be— well, it could easily be weeks. It’ll take days to wrap up this battlefield in any way, to finish healing anyone who needs it, to collect and catalogue bodies, to send notices home to families, and there’s evacuees to escort back to each village, and the reconstruction of Konoha to restart.

“Ino, I— I really, uh. Want this.”

Okay, well, there goes Sakura’s embarrassing blush, lighting up her face worse than a sunburn.

“I said we’d talk later, dummy,” Ino says, butting their foreheads together again gently. “I want this too.”

Sakura kisses her. And this time, she savors it, takes in the way Ino’s bangs brush against her cheek, the soft sigh she lets out, the drift of her fingers down the line of Sakura’s neck.

Oh, yes. Sakura could do this forever. And she’s a little peeved they didn’t get here sooner.

“I do have to leave, though,” Ino says guiltily. “It’s the last thing I want to do right now, but—” She shakes her head and shrugs. “We’ll talk. You can’t avoid me for too long, Haruno.”

Sakura smiles.

“I’ll walk out with you,” she replies. “I need to check on Naruto and Sasuke.” Something in her chest squeezes at the thought. _Her boys_. She’ll be surprised if they’re awake, but it won’t hurt to check on them. Just to reassure herself. Instead of the sharp retort about resting that Sakura had been expecting to hear, Ino simply lets out a soft hum and sits back.

“Well, then,” she sighs, “time to get back to it.”

She holds a hand down to Sakura, and Sakura takes it, and while she doesn’t magically have more strength to haul herself the hell up, she does feel decidedly better about it. Ino reaches out and straightens her collar, pushes some stray hair back and up into her clip.

There’s so much Sakura wants to say. There’s _so much_. But Ino is right. Later. They can talk later, when they’ve both gathered their wits, when they’ve both rested and had time to process their victory and their losses.

Ino sighs again, pushes her own bangs out of her face, wipes away the wetness lingering on her eyelashes, and gently nudges Sakura out of the tent.

 

 

Walking through the— the _camp_ , for lack of better term, is almost haunting. Sakura has no idea what on earth the Infinite Tsukuyomi could have possibly been like, but everyone looks run ragged in a way that’s got nothing to do with battle. Or perhaps everything to do with it.

Kakashi hasn’t spoken a word since he’d carefully brought Gai to the new _emergency_ emergency triage station they’d set up. She hasn’t seen Shikamaru at all. Tsunade has been talking to Orochimaru since they’d all woken up, and the mere thought makes Sakura’s skin crawl.

She smiles at Sai as she and Ino walk past them, and there’s something in their face that’s hesitant, bare, and Sakura wonders all over again just _what happened_ during Infinite Tsukuyomi to do this to so many people, to bring Gaara to the verge of shaking as he stood up, to fill Hinata’s eyes with confusion and uncertainty, to make Lee weep with raw grief like she’s never seen before.

Ino clears her throat.

“I’m heading that way,” she says, and tips her head west. “I’ll find you later.”

“Yeah,” Sakura replies, for lack of anything better to say. “Uh—”

They’re standing close, closer than they would have a week ago, and yet it doesn’t feel like a strange violation of personal space, and Sakura _scrambles._

What is the etiquette here? Are they— a _thing?_ Officially? Is there even a non-officially option? All Sakura wants to do right now is… frankly, lie down on the ground, preferably with Ino, and probably holding Ino’s hand, or just curled up, or something. And she wants to kiss Ino and hold her and shout to the whole god damn world _fuck you, Akatsuki, fuck you, Madara, fuck you, Kaguya, we fucking survived, we’re alive, all these people I love are still alive, and we would fight this fight over again in a heartbeat to keep it that way._

And so Sakura just— lurches forward, sort of, and kisses Ino on the cheek, and Ino _giggles_ and it’s the same giggle Sakura has known and loved since she was 6 years old and it’s— it’s good. They’re exhausted and every single person here is at the end of their rope but they saved the _fucking world_ , and it’s good.

(And even amid the dirt and the sweat and the grime, the ash and dust lingering in the air, Ino smells like flowers.)

 

 

The hum of soft conversation stops as she walks into the tent.

Naruto and Sasuke are awake, if barely. Barely. Naruto looks over at her and smiles, bright, but with an edge of sleep. Sasuke’s eyes don’t leave Naruto’s face for even a fraction of a second and there’s a dazedness about him, something shockingly like wonder in his eyes. Sakura files this away to mull over later, when she has the energy to start actually picking apart what’s happened during this whole war.

They both still look absolutely ragged. Their physical injuries have been more or less mitigated — bleeding stopped, swelling gone, deeper wounds well on their way to healing — but that’s not the reason they’re bedridden. (No, Sakura is a much better healer than that. She’d turn in her hitai-ate and take up farming if someone took more than a few minutes to pick themselves up after she’d healed a physical wound.)

Sakura doesn’t know what, exactly, happened at the Valley of the End. She’s not entirely sure she wants to know. What she can do, though, is take care of her teammates as they recover from… not just from whatever happened there, but from _everything_.

Fuck— Sakura scrubs at her eyes. _Fuck_. Naruto _died_. She had her hand inside his fucking chest and around his heart to save him.

But… they’re alive. Maybe not all of them, but those who gave their lives did so willingly, to give them a chance. And they _did it_. They’re alive. She can go back home, she can slowly start to adjust back into her life, she can go back to the fresh flowers Ino brings to their apartment almost daily just to have them—

 _Ino._ Hell.

“You’re all red,” Naruto notes. His voice is thick with sleep.

“I— no I’m not,” Sakura replies defensively, and she feels heat rising in her cheeks. Again.

“Yeah you are,” Naruto says, grinning sleepily. “Did that girlfriend comment to my dad really get you that flustered? I know I’m a catch, but you don’t have to feel shy around me.”

“Don’t be dense.” Sasuke finally tears his gaze off Naruto to roll his eyes imperiously, and Naruto scowls, and this is all so painfully familiar that Sakura feels weak, wobbly and unsteady and so full of warmth she might burst.

She drags a stool between their beds and with a sigh, she finally lets her knees give.

“How are you feeling?” she finally asks them.

“I’m great,” Naruto replies, a familiar smile inching back over his face, and he reaches his hand out towards her. She takes it, lets two fingers rest on his pulse point for long enough to count three even beats before gripping his palm, and Naruto squeezes gently.

“And you?” She looks over to Sasuke.

“Fine.”

He doesn’t turn his head, but a motion catches the corner of her eye and she looks down to see him turn his hand palm-up, the slightest semblance of an invitation. She slides her hand into his, takes a deep breath in, squeezes the hands of her _absolute idiot teammates_ , lets a deep breath out, and smiles.

It’s okay. Things might not be done, but for now, for the first time in so long, it’s okay.

 

* * *

 

She and Ino talk, eventually, but it comes a week after they finally come home, a week after Sakura collapses into Ino’s bed without a word and together they sleep like the dead, limbs a tangled mess.

(Two weeks later, Sakura’s bedroom in their apartment has become little more than a glorified storage room. Neither of them mind this.)

There are so many to bury. So many to grieve. But they do it together — as the Rookie Nine, as the Konoha not-really-Eleven, as shinobi, as friends. As Sakura and Ino.

Ino officially takes her father’s position, with stunning grace. Every shinobi in the sensor corps defers to her leadership with genuine respect, and Sakura’s pride swells every time she thinks about it.

Sasuke leaves. It’s surprising, but at the same time, it’s… not, not at all. She sees Naruto catch up to him, further down the road, and she can’t quite tell what’s going on in their conversation, but they both look— happy. Relaxed. Resolved. It’s a good look for them both.

Naruto throws himself into jōnin qualification with a kind of reckless joy that only he could manage to have about two years of intensive study and training. Kakashi makes Shikamaru an ambassador and sends him abroad, and Sakura finds Ino’s and Chōji’s moping in his absence to be infectious.

Things settle into a routine that feels more comfortable than anything she’s ever felt. She’s happy, well and truly. Even the weeks that are full of rough shifts at the hospital, full of cold sheets as Ino works overnight with Intelligence, they’re bearable because Sakura’s has better, and she knows she’ll have better again when it passes.

She finds herself slated to become director of the hospital and head of the medical corps, and she shamelessly doesn’t feel anything even remotely resembling _humble_ about it. She earned this, and she knows it. (Ino and Hinata and Naruto throw her a party the weekend before she officially gets the title, and the night snowballs into infamy so rapidly that it takes them all a week to fully recover.)

She writes Sasuke, occasionally, tacking her notes on to Kakashi’s reports. It’s nice to hear from him, and it’s even nicer to watch as his letters get progressively warmer.

Sakura cries like a damn infant at Naruto’s inauguration. Ino teases her relentlessly about it for a week, feigning a very strong case of amnesia regarding the fact that she’d cried, too. Sasuke ghosts into Konoha for the ceremony and then ghosts right back out, and when he leaves there’s something about Naruto’s solemn, peaceful silence that Sakura can’t quite put her finger on.

Konoha swells as reconstruction turns into improvement turns into expansion, as refugees and orphans and outcasts slowly start to settle in the village and find home, as the five Great Shinobi Nations stand together in peace. It’s loud and quiet and overwhelming and comforting all at once, and Sakura loves it. Naruto loves it, too, and sometimes she catches him staring out of the office windows with a heartbreakingly tender look on his face, watching students and families and shinobi and civilians meander through the streets.

There’s work, and there’s interns, and there’s the night she finally, _finally_ makes a breakthrough with Hinata’s assistance on something she’s been trying to quantify about chakra networks, and Sasuke comes back, he _comes back_ , the old Uchiha compound is being rebuilt and _he offers her and Ino a fucking house_ and they’ll be _neighbors_ and Naruto’s joy at his best friend’s return is a tangible thing, and, and—

If there’s anything in the world worth fighting for more than this, more than the sight of Naruto grinning at the people he passes on his way into the Hokage tower, more than the way Sasuke looks genuinely happy and at peace whenever she sees him, more than the way Ino always reflexively slips her hand into Sakura’s as they walk together, she hasn’t found it.

**Author's Note:**

> (this isn't beta'd, and while i trust my editing skills, if you see any typos or anything otherwise funky please let me know!!)
> 
> you know what’s funny? naruto was my entire life when i was in middle school and part of high school, but then i fell out of it and i didn’t keep up for a long chunk of time. then, about two years ago, someone mentioned to me that the series was over (i hadn’t even known it had ended!) and that there were ~grown up~ designs for everyone. i cannot even describe the awful feeling i got in my chest when i saw that one thrice-damned fuckshit godforsaken Maid Outfit panel of sakura in the manga. 
> 
> anyways, fuck that garbage, happy femslash february, dismantle the oppressive western hegemony of straightness, and enjoy the winter olympics!


End file.
